‘Is it okay if we don’t go out for breakfast?’ Lewis asks as he sits back on the bed.

‘Of course.’ Does this mean he wants to stay in and talk to her? To confide in her how he’s really feeling? She sits on the bed and strokes his arm.

‘But you should eat before you go,’ he says. ‘It’ll probably be a liquid-only picnic. My mum offered to bring food but Emma said no, told her she was handling it herself. What does that mean? When has Emma ever handled anything herself?’

Yvonne drops her hand. It still grates on her, his bitterness towards Emma, his lack of faith in her ability to get anything right. She no longer challenges him on it; it’s not worth the argument. But today is the last day of it, the last time she will have to stand by and hear him talk about Emma in this way.

He types a message on his phone and throws it down on the pillow.

‘This is really happening, isn’t it?’ he says.

Yvonne stares at the small wrapped package on the dresser, the personalised set of pencils she bought for Kiama. The last time she took him out to the Childhood Museum he had moaned about never being able to get a pencil or magnet with his name on it. ‘Emma, Emma, Emma,’ he said, pulling all the pencils with his mum’s name on them, ‘but never any Kiama. Why did they give me this name? The kids keep calling me KiamaObamaRama.’

Yvonne laughs.

‘What?’ Lewis says.

‘Nothing. Just thinking about something funny Kiama said to me the other day.’

‘I can’t believe she’s really taking my son away.’

It hurts to hear it and Yvonne thinks of her guilt, of how she encouraged Emma to go. Lewis doesn’t know about all of this, about the phone calls between them, the lending of money so Emma could book her flights without having to ask for her parents’ help.

She looks back at Lewis and the sadness seems to radiate off him. She’s never seen him like this before. ‘You know what Emma’s like,’ Yvonne tries. ‘She’ll probably get bored and come back in a few months.’

‘A few months,’ he laughs, his face turned to the ceiling. ‘When Kiama was about five, I messed up one too many times and Emma stopped me seeing him for a while.’

Yvonne remembers this, Emma’s fury at Lewis for repeatedly failing to pick up Kiama as promised on a Friday evening. Why is he bringing this up now?

‘It was over two months,’ he says. ‘She completely removed me from his life, didn’t answer my calls, wouldn’t open the door when I went over. Then finally, when I saw Kiama again, you know what happened?’